Texas AG files suit against Travis County over voter registration policies

AUSTIN, Texas — Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) filed a lawsuit Friday against Travis County over its voter registration policies, making it the third Democratic-leaning area in the state that he’s targeted.

Paxton’s charge: that Travis County, home of the state’s capital and the liberal stronghold of Austin, had hired a third-party company to help with voter registration, something that Paxton argues is outside of the authority of Texas municipalities.

In his suit on Friday, Paxton argued that the CEO of the company in question, Civic Government Solutions, has expressed “his interest in getting people to vote for progressive candidates.” 

“Travis County has blatantly violated Texas law by paying partisan actors to conduct unlawful identification efforts to track down people who are not registered to vote,” Paxton said in a statement. 

Such programs, he argued, “invite fraud and reduce public trust in our elections.”

Travis County spokesman Hector Nieto told The Hill that the county was “proud of our outreach efforts” while remaining “steadfast in our responsibility to uphold the integrity of the voter registration process.” 

“It is disappointing that any statewide elected official would prefer to sow distrust and discourage participation in the electoral process,” Nieto added.

Paxton’s suit against Travis County closely follows his Wednesday suit against Bexar County, the state’s fourth-largest urban county that is the home of San Antonio and another major Democratic stronghold — as well as warnings against Harris County, its largest, to kill its own voter registration drive.

The Hill has reached out to Travis County officials for comment.

Bexar County, like Travis, contracted with Civic Government Solutions, and Paxton’s principal argument is that counties have no more authority to send out voter registration forms than they do to distribute mail-in ballots — something that he successfully challenged Harris County, home of Houston, over in 2020 in a move that he has argued held Texas for former President Trump.

On Wednesday, Paxton warned Harris County against its own voter registration push, which it had shelved after pushback from state Sen. Paul Bettencourt (R), a Houston area representative who is also chair of the Senate Committee on Local Government.

But San Antonio pushed forward, arguing that Texas’s laws around voter registration are far more permissive than its laws around vote by mail.

Paxton’s filing comes in the context of narrowing state-level and presidential races in Texas, though GOP candidates like Sen. Ted Cruz and former President Trump are still strong favorites to win the state.

The suit is the latest in a series of recent attacks by state Republicans on Texas’s Democratic-leaning urban counties — a campaign that the state GOP argues is necessary to prevent widespread voting by noncitizens, despite numerous studies that have found noncitizens virtually never vote.

To take just a few examples: Last month, Paxton-directed agents searched the homes and offices of Democratic organizers and a candidate for a crucial state legislative seat that the GOP hopes to pick up. That was a step state Democrats and Latino organizations charged was intended to intimidate them and suppress turnout in a tightening Senate and presidential race.

That search coincided with claims by Gov. Greg Abbott (R) last month that his office had removed 6,000 noncitizens from voter rolls, of whom the governor claimed 2,000 had voted.

Paxton has also insisted, without evidence, that state progressive organizations are registering noncitizens to vote, and he has repeatedly appeared on conservative media to insist that Democrats are conspiring with Mexican criminal organizations to move undocumented immigrants into swing states — and use them to cement control of a new one-party state.

These sort of claims have gotten Paxton into trouble before. The attorney general is currently fighting a lawsuit from the State Bar of Texas, which seeks to discipline him for the false claims he made in his attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election of Joe Biden in favor of Trump.

The push against voter registration in municipalities like Travis County comes as part of decadelong crackdown by the state government on its liberal cities.

That campaign began in 2015 with steps by the Republican Legislature to outlaw bans on fracking or disposable plastic grocery bags and continued through drastic “blanket preemption” measures passed to strip Texas cities of large swaths of their authority in 2023. 

Paxton himself has also sued cities over local ordinances ranging from marijuana decriminalization to guaranteed basic income.

There is a strong through-line between these efforts and the recent voter registration fight: Paxton argued in his filings this week, as he did in the 2020 vote-by-mail case, that counties can only do what the state expressly permits them to, and that where that permission isn’t given, they should be assumed not to have authority. 

“Counties in Texas are limited to exercising those powers that are specifically conferred on them by statute or the constitution,” he wrote Friday.

“There is no statute empowering Defendants to identify and target potentially unregistered individuals who may or may not be eligible to register [to] vote.”

Instead, he argued, Travis County officials had “undermine[d] Texas law” because their actions might cause “individuals who are ineligible to vote to believe they may register.”

He acknowledged in his filing, however, that part of Civic Government Solutions’s contract required it to verify that those it registers are U.S. citizens, and Bexar County representatives pointed out earlier this week that those it registers get cross-checked by state and federal authorities to make sure they are actually citizens. 

This story was updated at 1:56 p.m.